The Munich Agreement and subsequent German occupation of Czechoslovakia led to the disbanding of the Czechoslovak Army, and Opálka's career ended.

He was found days later by the Nazis, and he committed suicide in the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague after a gunfight in which he was injured.

Opálka was born in Rešice near Dukovany the illegitimate son of miller Viktor Jarolím (1889–1942) of Tulešice and Anežka Opálková.

The Munich Agreement ended Opálka's army career in his homeland, and he left Czechoslovakia with his cousin František Pospíšil.

[2][4] On 12 July 1940, when France was defeated, Opálka sailed on the troopship SS Neuralia to the United Kingdom and as an unfiled officer served in a machine gun platoon.

A navigational mistake by the Handley Page Halifax plane bringing them in caused the entire group to be dropped at the wrong location.

[6] Operation Anthropoid involved a plot to kill Reinhard Heydrich, the Reichsprotektor of wartime Bohemia and Moravia with a modified anti-tank grenade.

[8][9] Shortly after his departure, on his 27th birthday, Opálka wrote of homesickness: I'm 27 years old today, the entire trip I pondered upon the words "Longing for home is a terrible thing, I know".

I'm willing to suffer through, and do whatever it takes, but only home and home and to honestly work, work for something... How can some speak of beauty, when they've never seen Rešice and the fields from Kordula to Rešice, who never strolled through the warm dirt there, who never felt the warm air and over the grain fields, who never saw our chapel in the milk of white cherries, Husák's garden, which always reminded me of Sholokhov, especially the dirt lumps under the "vortex" and the "Bare Hill" and all the other places on all of which I am.